Author: Melissa Bridwell

Like many classroom revolutions, it began in silence. A teacher somewhere — probably skeptical, probably overworked — slipped a deck of theory trading cards onto a desk and waited. They were picked up by the students. They argued. They traded. Something worked. That scene, or some version of it, has been repeating itself across American high schools with surprising consistency over the past year or so. David Gauntlett’s theory trading cards — originally designed as a playful academic tool for thinking through ideas about creativity and identity — have found an unexpected audience in a country that tends to be…

One is always present. You can find it somewhere in any graduate seminar room in America, whether it’s tucked under a stack of photocopied readings or leaning against a malfunctioning projector. These rooms are characterized by mismatched chairs, a whiteboard that still bears the scent of last Tuesday’s argument, and a smell that falls somewhere between library dust and someone’s abandoned lunch. The card. Despite being coffee-stained at the bottom right, dog-eared at two corners, and annotated in at least three distinct handwriting styles, it is still readable enough to serve as the intellectual hub of a whole field. Almost…

Recently, a specific type of desk photo has become popular on Instagram. You are aware of the type: a beautiful study spread, coffee in a ceramic mug, a candle, or a warm lamp that casts amber light over a notebook. However, over the past few months, these flat-lays have undergone a change. There are now little decks of cards tucked in with the annotated syllabi and highlighters. Laminated, illustrated, and somewhat reminiscent of Pokémon cards with bell hooks in place of Pikachu. Theory trading cards, which are card-sized summaries of academic theorists and their main ideas with printed frameworks and…

In his most well-known essay, Michel de Certeau imagines himself standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center and gazing down at the Manhattan grid, which appears to be a sentence written in steel and concrete. He claimed that the view turns the disorganized human city into a readable text that is clear and comprehensive when viewed from above. “But what about the people down there on the street who can’t see any of it?” he asks right away. Four decades after de Certeau first posed it, urban studies programs throughout New York continue to return to that…

In the narrative of how the internet transformed education, a minor detail is often overlooked. Before Google became a verb, before Wikipedia debuted in 2001, and before the term “digital humanities” was coined, Larry Benson, a Harvard professor, was sitting at a personal computer, pecking away in Unix code, creating something that had yet to be given a name. Like many good stories, this one starts with a real-world issue. In the 1980s and 1990s, Benson instructed a sizable lecture course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that occasionally attracted 300 students at a time. He was able to recover the magnetic…

When a professor says it’s time to work through media theory, a certain kind of silence descends upon a university seminar room. Pupils don’t leave. They don’t object. They just move on in their own minds, nodding now and then, perhaps emphasizing a sentence they’ll never come back to. That silence is probably familiar to anyone who spent time in those rooms in the late 1990s or early 2000s. David Gauntlett also identified it somewhere in Britain. Around 2000, Gauntlett, a media and communications lecturer at the time, started Theory.org.uk. Built with the sincere enthusiasm of someone who truly thought…

Spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a piece of cardboard and then putting it inside a thin vinyl sleeve inside a three-ring binder that costs four dollars at a pharmacy seems a little ridiculous. This tension is familiar to anyone who has seriously collected Pokémon cards. The storage options typically don’t keep up with the cards’ increasing value. This is likely the reason why collectors quickly took notice when AF_inventions, a designer, uploaded a 3D-printable card binder to the maker platform Thangs earlier this year. At first glance, the design appears small and almost uncomplicated. Inserts made especially…

The way American academia treats Theodor Adorno is subtly embarrassing. He is referenced in footnotes. He is assigned in thick photocopied packets that students skim the night before class, and he appears in syllabi sandwiched between Foucault and Benjamin. In faculty lounges, his name carries weight, but if you ask a sophomore what negative dialectics actually entails, you’ll get a courteous shrug. The concepts are there. Typically, the comprehension is not. Because of this, it’s important to pay attention to a small, almost unassuming educational product that has been making the rounds in some philosophy and media studies circles: a…

Walk down the hallway of almost any sociology or communication studies department at a mid-sized American university and you’ll notice something strange pinned between office hours printouts and conference flyers. It’s not a poster. Not a motivational quote. It’s roughly the size of a baseball card — laminated, sometimes a little crooked — and it features the face of a dead European theorist staring back at you with the quiet authority of someone who fully expected to be famous. The Theory Trading Card has arrived on campus. And depending on who you ask, it is either the most refreshing pedagogical…

You might notice something on the tables that doesn’t belong if you walk into some of the sociology seminars that are currently taking place at American universities. These seminars are typically held in small spaces with mismatched chairs and fluorescent lighting. Not precisely. Little laminated cards, carefully stacked in rows, each with a dense cluster of concepts on one side and the name and thumbnail portrait of a theorist on the other. Students treat them with the same reverence that is reserved for things that are both serious and enjoyable at the same time, just as children used to handle…